Announcing the Launch of Freedom on the Move

February 14, 2019 By Vanessa Holden in Announcements, Digital History, Slavery Tags: ads, advertisements, announcements, Digital History, education, enslaved, enslavers, fugative, Inspiration, newspapers, Public History, Rebellion, research, Resistance, self-liberation, Slavery 3 Comments

An ad placed in the Charleston Mercury, Charleston, SC, on July 11, 1829. Accessed via: Freedom on the Move

Thousands of enslaved African Americans emancipated themselves by taking flight and escaping their enslavers. One way that this form of resistance to slavery can be studied is through the advertisements that enslavers and jailers placed in newspapers in hopes of turning those who had run away back into “property.” The ads allow us a glimpse of both enslavers’ desires and the defiance of the enslaved. In them, it is possible to read pain and suffering in the record of scars and maimed bodies. The ads hold both the grief of separation from kin left behind and the relief of family mentioned at possible destinations. Historians have long used advertisements for fugitives from slavery to study the institution of slavery and the lives of enslaved people. But it can be difficult for the public to access them because the ads exist in multiple formats across multiple archives.

“The Runaway” Anti-slavery record. New York: Published by R.G. Williams, for the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1835-1837. Accessed via The Fels African Americana Image Project at Library Company of Philadelphia

Freedom on the Move (FOTM), an online project devoted to fugitives from slavery in North America, launches today, February 14, 2019. FOTM asks the public to help in creating a database that makes the stories and lives of fugitives from slavery in North America accessible. The website is designed for use by scholars, researchers, educators, students, genealogist, and the public. After quickly setting up an account, users can begin transcribing digitized versions of advertisements and recording important information included in each ad. Participants can even choose to work on ads from specific time periods or geographic locations. Users can also search for and browse through digitized ads.

Currently, FOTM has about 12,000 newspaper advertisements ready for crowdsourced transcription. The project will include additional ads soon and its organizers hope for future collaborations with additional scholars, archives, and organizations. FOTM promises to be an invaluable resource in the classroom and for researchers. But beyond the academic applications of the project, organizers hope that the site will facilitate greater access to members of the public outside of the academy. By transcribing and working with the advertisements, participants can both contribute to a growing database of searchable ads and engage with the rich history that each ad presents.

FOTM is a joint project between Cornell University’s Department of History and the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER). Ed Baptist of Cornell University and William Block (Director of CISER) serve as the principal investigators for FOTM. Lead historians on the project include Vanessa Holden of the University of Kentucky, Hasan Jeffries of Ohio State University, Mary Niall Mitchell of the University of New Orleans, and Joshua Rothman of the University of Alabama. The project has received major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Archives.

To learn more about the project or to begin contributing to FOTM’s crowdsourcing, visit freedomonthemove.org

Q&A: Edward Rugemer, author of Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World

January 15, 2019 By Emily Yankowitz in Interviews with Historians, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Atlantic World, Caribbean, Edward Rugemer, legal history, Slavery Leave a comment

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Today at The Junto, we’re featuring an interview with Ed Rugemer about his new book, of Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, which Casey Schmitt reviewed yesterday. Ed Rugemer is an Associate Professor of History and African American Studies and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of History at Yale University. A historian of slavery and abolition, Rugemer’s first book The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War was published by Louisiana State University Press and his work has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Slavery and Abolition, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

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Review: Edward Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World

January 14, 2019 By Casey Schmitt in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Atlantic World, Caribbean, Edward Rugemer, legal history, Slavery Leave a comment

Today The Junto reviews Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World by Yale Associate Professor of African American Studies and History, Edward Rugemer. Stay tuned for a Q&A with the author tomorrow!

Historians have long argued that enslaved people’s resistance to bondage shaped the political economies, legal structures, and societies of the early Atlantic World. As a comparative history of slavery in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance coheres around “the existential struggle between the master and the slave” that forms the core dialectic between control and resistance at the heart of slavery (1). Edward Rugemer places these slave societies in comparison because, as he argues, they developed out of the same legal genealogy rooted in seventeenth-century English imperial expansion but experienced the end of slavery in dramatically different ways. In just over three hundred pages, the book traces the dialectic between control and resistance in these societies “after an epic struggle of eight generations” (2). Rugemer’s approach combines a synthesis of a rich body of scholarship on the development of legal systems of bondage with strategic archival research. And, as the book demonstrates, the “combination of similarities and differences” between Jamaica and South Carolina yields “a novel approach to understanding the political dynamics of slave resistance and their relation to the law” (3).

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New Orleans at 300: A Year in Review and a Look to the Future

December 28, 2018 By Philippe Halbert in Vast Early America Tags: Africa, African-American history, anniversary, Antebellum South, Archives, Atlantic Creoles, Atlantic World, Caribbean, Deep South, digital archives, French Atlantic, Louisiana, museums, New Orleans, Public History, Slavery, southern history, Spain, Spanish America, Spanish Empire, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

As 2018 comes to a close, I can’t help but reflect on this year and its meaning for a place that has become near and dear to my heart (and in-progress dissertation): New Orleans. Founded by the French in 1718, Louisiana’s largest city has been celebrating its tricentennial for months and in a way that only New Orleans can. Ranked number one on the New York Times “52 Places to Go in 2018” list, New Orleans continues to attract first-timers curious to discover “America’s most foreign city.” Repeat visitors, myself included, just can’t get enough, although my trips have taken me beyond Bourbon Street, from the attic of the city’s colonial-era Ursuline convent to the notarial archives of Orleans Parish, hidden within a twenty-story office building a stone’s throw from the Superdome. My own excursions aside, how exactly have we gone about celebrating, remembering, and thinking about the history of early New Orleans in 2018? What does the future hold?

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Guest Post: Julia de Recour, the Digital Archive, and the Histories of Atlantic Children of Color

November 28, 2018 By The Junto Moderator in Childhood & Youth, Digital History, Guest Posts Tags: Archives, children, Children of Color, Digital History, Saint Domingue, Slavery, women, youth 3 Comments

Vue du Port de Baltimore, ca. 1834 by Louis Garneray (photo courtesy of the Enoch Pratt Free Library)

Today’s Guest Post comes from Nathan H. Dize, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in Haitian literature and history. His dissertation, currently entitled “Mortuary Poetics: Power and the Performance of Mourning in the Haitian Literary Imaginary,” explores how Haitian writers and artists revivify the dead through creative acts of mourning to challenge official memories and mythologies of the Haitian past. He is a content curator, translator, and editor of A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789. He is also the co-editor of the H-Haiti series “Haiti in Translation,” which interviews translators of Haitian writing. Nathan has published articles, reviews, and translations in journals such as sx archipelagos, the Journal of Haitian Studies, Francosphères, SX Salon, Contemporary French Civilization, and the Haitian History Journal of which he is also an advisory board member. Follow him on Twitter @NathanHDize.

In September 1782, Julia de Recour boarded the St. Patrick in Cap Français with her mother, a woman of about 40, to join some relations in Baltimore. When she arrived, Charles Biddle writes that she had the “good fortune” of attracting the French First Consul, Charles François Adrien Le Paulmier le Chevalier d’Annemours, who immediately took her as his wife.[1] Biddle describes Julia as a lively French lady and a “spritely brown girl of 16.”[2] Biddle’s account of Julia’s travel on the St. Patrick is shrouded in innuendo, particularly when Julia took to the ship’s deck in the cold to dance and “perform some other monkey tricks.”[3] Without providing more information Biddle writes in his autobiography that we do not know when or where Julia died, but that it is reasonable to believe that she was not living in 1792. As Saidiya Hartman once wrote of the enslaved girl immortalized in William Wilberforce’s speech before the House of Commons in April of 1792, “a few musty lines […] are the entire story of a girl’s life.”[4]

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Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Anna Mae Duane

November 14, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Interviews with Historians, Slavery, The History of Childhood & Youth, Vast Early America Tags: childhood, Children's literature, power, Slavery, youth Leave a comment

Today is our final post in the roundtable series on the History of Childhood & Youth. If you missed previous posts click here. Thank you to each of our invited scholars for generously sharing tidbits of their research and their perspectives on this growing and dynamic field.

Dr. Anna Mae Duane, cited by several of our roundtable participants, rounds up this series. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Her scholarship focuses on children and race in a variety of constellations, including children as both victims and political actors in Puritan trial proceedings, antebellum literature, pre-and post-emancipation slave narratives, contemporary children’s literature, modern anti-slavery materials, and adult popular culture. Her current project, Educated for Freedom: Two Black Schoolmates who Changed a Slave Nation (forthcoming, NYU) focuses on the role of childhood—their own and others—shaped the political imagination of two of antebellum America’s most influential Black abolitionists. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (UGeorgia, 2010) and editor of The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies in the Humanities (UGeorgia, 2013), and Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies (Cambridge, 2017). She is co-editor, with Kate Capshaw, of Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature before 1900. (UMinnesota, 2017). Her work has been published in several scholarly journals, as well as public forums including Slate, Salon and Avidly.

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Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Vanessa Holden

October 31, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Slavery, The History of Childhood & Youth Tags: chlidhood, Rebellion, Roundtable, slave resist, Slavery, youth 2 Comments

If you missed the first two posts in our new roundtable series on the history of childhood and youth, click here. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the next few weeks, stop by to read about challenges and realities of researching and teaching childhood and youth across vast early America.

We are thrilled to have The Junto’s very own Dr. Vanessa M Holden join the roundtable today to discuss her work on African American children, free and enslaved. Dr. Holden is an assistant professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Holden’s current book project, tentatively titled, Surviving Southampton: Gender, Community, Resistance and Survival During the Southampton Rebellion of 1831(University of Illinois Press), explores the contributions that African American women and children, free and enslaved, made to the Southampton Rebellion of 1831, also called Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Dr. Holden’s work and writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. She also blogs for Black Perspectives. In addition to her work on enslaved women and slave rebellion, Dr. Holden also co-organizes the Queering Slavery Working Group with Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University). Her second project, Forming Intimacies: Queer Kinship and Resistance in the Antebellum American Atlantic, will focus on same gender loving individuals and American slavery. Follow her on Twitter @drvholden Continue reading →

Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Crystal Webster

October 29, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Slavery, The History of Childhood & Youth, Vast Early America Tags: childhood, emancipation, interviews, Roundtable, roundtables, Slavery, youth 2 Comments

If you missed our first post on Friday in our new roundtable series on the history of childhood and youth with Bianca Premo, click here! On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the next few weeks, stop by to read about challenges and realities of researching and teaching childhood and youth across vast early America.

Today, Dr. Crystal Lynn Webster joins us to discuss her work on nineteenth-century African American women and children. Dr. Webster is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She received her PhD from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of African American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and was previously a long-term Mellon dissertation fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia (2016-17) program in African American history. Her current book project, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: Northern African American Children’s Cultural and Political Resistance, examines the lives of Black children in the antebellum North and their experiences in juvenile reformatories, orphanages, schools, as well as their role in emerging social movements concerning race and childhood. Her research has been funded by the Library Company of Philadelphia, American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she has received first place writing awards from the National Council for Black Studies and the Association of Black Women Historians. Continue reading →

On Wednesdays We Wear Prints: Fashion Rules in the African Atlantic

September 18, 2018 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables, Uncategorized Tags: African history, Britain, Fashion, History of Fashion, Sierra Leone, Slavery, women's history 2 Comments

Stella McCartney Spring/Summer 2018 ready-to-wear fashion collection, Paris, Oct. 2, 2017. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Today’s #ColonialCouture post is by Bronwen Everill, lecturer in history at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University, and author of Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Cambridge Series in Imperial and Post-colonial Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Follow her @BronwenEverill.

In 2017, Stella McCartney ran into trouble during Paris fashion week. Her faux pas was cultural appropriation: using Nigerian Ankara fabrics, reportedly pretending to have “discovered” them, and dressing her almost exclusively white group of models in the fabric.

In 1791, British traveller Anna Maria Falconbridge complained of the failure of her own attempt to promote cultural appropriation of European fashions, while describing her visit to the Temne, in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Spending time with Clara, the wife of the royal secretary, “I endeavoured to persuade her to dress in the European way, but to no purpose; she would tear the clothes off her back immediately after I put them on. Finding no credit could be gained by trying to new fashion this Ethiopian Princess, I got rid of her as soon as possible.”[1] Now, maybe it’s just me, but I always think Anna Maria would have given Gretchen Wieners a run for her money as Regina George’s BFF. Her book, Two Voyages in Sierra Leone, is full of snarky comments about fashion in Sierra Leone, but it comes across as so much posturing. Continue reading →

Why We Will Not Go

September 6, 2018 By Adam McNeil in Black Women, Uncategorized Tags: Abolitionism, American Colonization Society, intellectual history, Print Culture, Slavery Leave a comment

How and why does a group in a society feel affection for the society they live in, despite the constant abuses faced by them? A great case study to help answer the question is through the anti-slavery movement. Boston abolitionist intellectual Maria Stewart, after the loss of both her husband, James Stewart and intellectual mentor, abolitionist David Walker in 1830, refocused her life on Jesus and fighting for her race. From that foundation, she met and collaborated with upstart white abolitionist newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison of The Liberator. Garrison was a major influence on Stewart’s public career because Garrison promoted Stewart as a voice of her people, and the Liberator offered her room to publicly debate the best policies for her race’s future. In one of Stewart’s published writings in the Liberator, she wrote about death to the body of the enslaved, that would also free the soul. “The blood of her murdered ones cries to heaven for vengeance against thee. Thou art almost drunken with the blood of her slain.[1]” The plunder of black bodies effectively built the United States, and based upon Stewart’s interpretation, America became drunk from its excess. Continue reading →